Doug Mashek, PhD, a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, leads a team of researchers who discovered that olive oil in the Mediterranean diet may hold the key to improving lifespan and mitigating aging-related diseases. Over the last eight years, with the help of multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health, their research findings were recently published in Molecular Cell.

Early studies on the diet suggested red wine was a major contributor to the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet because it contains a compound called resveratrol, which activated a certain pathway in cells known to increase lifespan and prevent aging-related diseases. However, work in Mashek’s lab suggests that it is the fat in olive oil, another component of the Mediterranean diet, that is actually activating this pathway.

According to Mashek, merely consuming olive oil is not enough to elicit all of the health benefits. His team’s studies suggest that when coupled with fasting, limiting caloric intake and exercising, the effects of consuming olive oil will be most pronounced.

“We found that the way this fat works is it first has to get stored in microscopic things called lipid droplets, which is how our cells store fat. And then, when the fat is broken down during exercising or fasting, for example, is when the signaling and beneficial effects are realized,” Mashek said.

The next steps for their research are to translate it to humans with the goal of discovering new drugs or to further tailor dietary regimens that improve health, both short-term and long-term.

“We want to understand the biology, and then translate it to humans, hopefully changing the paradigm of healthcare from someone going to eight different doctors to treat his or her eight different disorders,” Mashek said. “These are all aging-related diseases, so let’s treat aging.”

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Materials provided by University of Minnesota Medical School. Original written by Angel Mendez. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The work, led by Samantha Kleinberg, associate professor of computer science at Stevens, is helping reframe the idea of how we use the mountain of data extracted from artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms and how healthcare professionals and financial advisors present this new information to their patients and clients.

“Being accurate is not enough for information to be useful,” said Kleinberg. “It’s assumed that AI and machine learning will uncover great information, we’ll give it to people and they’ll make good decisions. However, the basic point of the paper is that there is a step missing: we need to help people build upon what they already know and understand how they will use the new information.”

For example: when doctors communicate information to patients, such as recommending blood pressure medication or explaining risk factors for diabetes, people may be thinking about the cost of medication or alternative ways to reach the same goal. “So, if you don’t understand all these other beliefs, it’s really hard to treat them in an effective way,” said Kleinberg, whose work appears in the Feb. 13 issue of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.

Kleinberg and colleagues asked 4,000 participants a series of questions about topics with which they would have varying degrees of familiarity. Some participants were asked to make decisions on scenarios they could not possibly be familiar with i.e. how to get a group of mind-reading aliens to accomplish a task. Other participants were asked about more familiar topics i.e. choosing how to reduce risk in a retirement portfolio or deciding between specific meals and activities to manage bodyweight.

For some participants, scenarios had a causal structure, meaning that participants could make the correct decision based on the causal relationship laid out either in text or as a diagram . The team was then able to compare whether people did better or worse with new information or just using what they already knew.

Kleinberg and her team, including former Stevens graduate student Min Zheng and cognitive scientist Jessecae Marsh from Lehigh University, found that when people make decisions in novel scenarios, such as those including mind-reading aliens, they do very well on that problem. “People are just focusing on what’s in the problem,” said Kleinberg. “They are not adding in all this extra stuff.”

However, when that problem, with the same causal structure, was replaced with information about finances and retirement, for example, people became less confident in their choices and made worse decisions, suggesting that their prior knowledge got in the way of choosing the best outcome.

Kleinberg found the same to be true when she posed a problem about health and exercise, as it relates to diabetes. When people without diabetes read the problem, they treated the new information at face value, believed it and used it successfully. People with diabetes, however, started second-guessing what they knew and as in the previous example, did much worse.

“In situations where people do not have background knowledge, they become more confident with the new information and make better decisions,” said Kleinberg. “So there’s a big difference in how we interpret the information we are given and how it affects our decision making when it relates to things we already know vs. when it’s in a new or unfamiliar setting.”

Kleinberg cautions that the point of the paper is not that information is bad. She argues only that in order to help people make better decisions, we need to better understand what people already know and tailor information based on that mental model. The National Science Foundation recently awarded Kleinberg, in collaboration with Marsh, a grant entitled, “Uniting Causal and Mental Models For Shared Decision-making in Diabetes,” to address this very issue.

“People hold a certain set of beliefs about disease and treatment, finances and retirement,” said Kleinberg. “So more information, even with explicit causal relationships, may not be enough to steer people to make the best decisions. It’s how we tailor that information to this existing set of beliefs that will yield the best results — and that’s what we want to figure out.”

In manufacturing, controlling the three-dimensional shapes of macrocycles is critical. It helps decide, for example, whether the aroma in a perfume is unique or whether a prescription drug will work on a particular disease.

But for synthetic chemists, those who study the construction of molecules, controlling the topology of the large rings has not been a straightforward process — until now, that is, thanks to research done at Université de Montréal.

In a study published today in Science, a team led by chemistry professor Shawn Collins reports they have succeeded in using a natural process called biocatalysis to control the shapes of macrocycles.

And that could be a boon for the making of pharmaceuticals and electronics, they say.

“The shapes of the macrocycles we have made is what makes them special — they are what we call planar chiral,” said Collins. “And the planar chiral topology controls how the molecules interact with nature. In general, macrocycles with planar chirality are underexplored, because chemists usually have a lot of trouble making them.”

Until now, they had two choices: perform multi-step syntheses that are tedious and wasteful, or they could exploit methods that employ catalysts based on elements that are toxic, expensive and non-abundant in the Earth’s crust, such as ruthenium and rhodium.

Both approaches have long frustrated chemists, and Collins’ team looked for an alternative. They found it in biocatalysis, a process that uses enzymes, biological and typically non-toxic catalysts, as a solution to preparing planar chiral macrocycles.

Remarkably, even though chemists had never before explored biocatalysis for the synthesis of planar chiral macrocycles, it turned out there was a commercially available product that could prepare the macrocycle: a lipase enzyme called CALB.

Using it, the biocatalysts were able to shape the macrocycles in often near-perfect selectivity, even though the enzyme had not evolved for that purpose.

Importantly, Collins and his team came up with a synthetic plan that involved using simple molecular building blocks to “decorate” macrocycles with functionality. “Functionality are handles, or simple groups of atoms that be easily transformed into arrangements that are more complex,” Collins explained.

“Our hope is that the macrocycles can now be tailored to impact industry. Planar chiral macrocycles have already been known to act as antibiotics and anticancer agents. Applications in electronic materials — in lasers and display devices, for example — could be possible using the approach.”

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Materials provided by University of Montreal. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

“Keeping people safe as the climate continues to change is a big challenge,” said Mach, an associate professor of marine ecosystems and society at the UM Rosenstiel School. “Because climate change is long-term with widespread impacts, knowledge of the risks is particularly important for prudent societal investments.”

In an article for the journal Climate Policy, Mach and coauthor Noah W. Feinstein, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, describe the importance of education in adapting to climate change. Their paper, “Three roles for education in climate change adaptation,” argues that educational tools — including schools, simulations, and on-the-job training — have the potential to substantially accelerate the adaptation process.

“Education goes way beyond K-12,” said Feinstein. “If we want decision-makers to make the best use of critical new information, we also need to support learning before, during, and after each decision point.”

In a special issue of the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Mach and colleagues delve deeper into the question of what knowledge is most critical — and how it becomes useful to people increasing their preparedness for climate change. They discuss insights emerging across disciplines on the relationship between knowledge and action in decision-making surrounding climate change. The researchers suggest a set of best practices to support climate change adaptation into the future.

In the article, “Actionable knowledge and the art of engagement,” Mach discusses the different approaches for making knowledge actionable, many of which involve increasing interactions between researchers and stakeholders in different ways.

“Current knowledge on climate change risks and response options has an important role to play in informing society’s choices and decisions in a changing climate,” said Mach. “However, often this knowledge is not as useful for people as it might be.”

In the same special issue, Mach co-authored a paper on how the “co-production” of knowledge has fared for climate change adaptation. The researchers point out that the co-production of knowledge, in which researchers, practitioners, stakeholders, and decision-makers interact in processes of climate change adaptation, requires that different approaches be matched to the types of decisions and decision-making contexts at hand. It’s about researchers and practitioners working together in ongoing and meaningful ways.